I can see a royalty-free AV1 as being an excellent still image codec, and potentially, finally, something that could replace JPEG on the web for continuous tone images.

Don't get your hopes up. Jpeg is rather resilient. Even google couldn't popularize webp. An there were a bunch of other formats that didn't gain any traction.
To me FLIF looks interesting for images, and it's a finished format. But I don't have high hopes that I'll be seeing anything new in the browser.

It's different. WebP was only Google's project. Even Mozilla haven't support it, heh. Nor Microsoft...
While AV1 is supported/promoted by many big players http://aomedia.org/about-us/
WebP is barely better than JPEG (~15-20%) while AV1, HEVC or Daala are considerably better than that.

Also JPEG is damn good image format. There is still no other image format with 2x better compression than JPEG.
While H.264 and HEVC already outperform MPEG-2 by more than 2x on wide range of bitrates.

It's different. WebP was only Google's project. Even Mozilla haven't support it, heh. Nor Microsoft...
While AV1 is supported/promoted by many big players http://aomedia.org/about-us/
WebP is barely better than JPEG (~15-20%) while AV1, HEVC or Daala are considerably better than that.

You mean Google's project like Webm, and VP9? Those didn't get any input from others either, yet all relevant browsers support them now.
The only difference is that there's no JPEG in video formats, which is supported by everything anywhere.

Quote:

Originally Posted by IgorC

Also JPEG is damn good image format. There is still no other image format with 2x better compression than JPEG.
While H.264 and HEVC already outperform MPEG-2 by more than 2x on wide range of bitrates.

Daala is likely to be continued after AV1 as an experimental codec. It achieved near HEVC quality levels without even nearly being finished (it doesn't even have B-Frames yet) and compared to AV1 it is much less complex. So let's see...